


Grains of Time

by TriassicParker



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bandages, Blood, Buried Alive, Drowning, Gen, Gore, Short Story, Stand Alone, Time constraints, Wounds, hopelessness, scorpion, third person, time does not stand still
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 06:25:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19245634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriassicParker/pseuds/TriassicParker
Summary: Written in 2015 for an English Studies assignment with the prompt: Time Does Not Stand Still.





	Grains of Time

A bandaged man sleeps on a coarse, gravelly bed of sand. The grit lines his dry mouth and fills his wounds. The man’s dark hair is dusty, his white cloak and shawl turned brown from the powder. The stagnant air turns his usually heavy breathing into a hoarse rasp. The man stirs, having felt the sand shift. He felt dizzy, splotches formed in the corners of his eye as he stood up. He immediately collapsed back down to the ground. The dunes had begun to shift and turn.  
His hour has begun.  
The sand begins to roll and collapse around the man; he runs and fights to stay above them. A large red dune chases and lands upon him; he scrambles earnestly, pulling himself out of the gripping dirt. He pants, trying to find clean air to fill his tired lungs. Instead, his lungs get a coating of dust. He flops into the dust, coughing and spluttering.  
Although not still, the sand calms down. The man’s coughing becomes less frequent. He decides to walk away from the moving grains.  
He loses his grip on the moving ground and begins to roll back with the grains. He tries to catch a grip on something, anything – but only sand surrounds him. He slides, almost snake like down the depression in the grit the falling particles had formed. He started to slip down the funnel, clawing to keep out of the sinking sand.  
He scrambles as the sand compressed him, grit slipping back into his weak lungs, filling his throat, he screams. As he files down the neck he knocks his forehead, and everything goes black.  
As the man regains consciousness, he looks up only to get dust in his eye. He wipes his tired, bloodied face. He notes the new scratches, grazes and the reopened wounds. The lump on his forehead hurts the least. After pulling himself out of the sand slowly burying him, he re-wraps his bandages, careful around his empty socket.  
The sand is a lot calmer, apart from the growing mountain of sand beside him; he walks away, heading outward. The desert seems so barren; empty. Not even a dune changes the landscape. He walks and walks, stumbling over his own feet, wishing for a breeze, or even death.  
Suddenly, something shifts beneath the sand. The man thinks he’s hallucinating, nothing but the falling sand behind him had moved, yet this was in front of him. He moves forward, wary of what could shift the ground in such a way.  
As he walks, he notices a new feeling on his feet: instead of the gritty sand, the texture felt smooth, even calming on his feet. He looked down to see a glossy brown. He narrows his eye, unsure if whether what he is seeing is true. It looks like… glass. The man laughs – dust blowing out of his mouth: glass beneath the desert. He knows he would be crying if he wasn’t so dehydrated.  
He begins to run over the glass, his footing producing a tapping thud. He reaches a smooth, glass wall. He falls to his knees as he reaches it. His fists clenched, he screams. He mutters a word under his breath, jumping at the sound of a voice, even though it is own: Hourglass.  
The same slick movement, not hidden by sand this time around, shimmers in the corner of his eye. He looks and as he does blood drains from his face.  
The scorpion was iridescent and shining in the reflections of its own light and the glass. It made a noise, almost a hiss. Its tail throbbed, pointing at the man. The man saw no other option but to run.  
His feet bled and blistered as he reached the sand again, but he couldn’t stop, he wouldn’t stop. The scorpion’s hiss and scuttling sounded nearer and nearer. The man reached the mountain. He climbed the sand, desperately clawing at the powder for a grip. Somehow, merely through adrenaline and will, he climbed to the top. The sand was still falling, but the scorpion refused to follow him up.  
The scorpion paced around the pile, almost guarding the man. Several more scorpions, smaller ones, joined the scorpion in his duty. The man fell asleep, the hissing and sifting sand turning to a lullaby.  
It wasn’t until the man struggled to get a large enough gulp of air that he stirred, all around him was sand and darkness. He scrambled, clawing fighting, trying to cry. He can’t feel the air, his fight wearing him out.  
As the last grain of sand falls from the hourglass neck, the man takes his last grainy breath. The grain lands beside his grazed hand, the only visible part of the buried man. Time had not stood still.

**Author's Note:**

> This was published in my school magazine under my dead name, and has been slightly edited. It is otherwise an entirely original work.


End file.
